Friend or Enemy ?
The real purpose of the pamphlet is, however, to decide whether or not the starling is an agricultural pest. Here, again, conclusive results can only be obtained by exhaustive tests of a large percentage of the starling population over a period of years. Starlings are accused of eating wheat, which they undoubtedly do, but the stomachs of thirteen starlings shot " in the act of eating grain " contained 91 caterpillars, 65 leather-jackets, 3o wireworms, 74 click-beetles, 34 dung-beetles, and 3o weevils. It is significant that a disastrous increase in all these pests occurred in the spring of 1940, after a prolonged period when starlings were either being starved to death or were deprived of their usual sources of food. Another accusation against the starling is that it is carrier of foot-and-mouth disease. Large numbers of migratory star- lings leave the Continent every winter and join the great flocks here in England ; but no one has yet proved that a disease may be carried by one migratory species and not another. The starling, indeed, as Miss Meiklejohn points out, is still imperfectly known. Whether it is increasing or decreasing, whether it is friend or foe, whether it carries disease or not, are all questions to which the answers are so far inconclusive. Odd that a bird now numbered by millions should so remain something of a mystery.
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